Optimizing Social Communication Measurement with the Social Responsiveness Scale

​This project aims to: 1) compare the psychometric characteristics (including distributional properties, agreement with gold-standard diagnostic measures, and sensitivity and specificity) of short versus full Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) scores, using existing child SRS data from the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) study; 2) use existing SRS data in ECHO to compare the performance of short versus full SRS scores in analyses of established risk factors for autism spectrum disorder (gestational age and parental age), as well as in assessment of familiality of scores (previously established for the full scale) in cohorts with available parental scores; and 3) A) develop a computer-adaptive testing (CAT)-based SRS, and B) conduct a separate validation of the 16-item short form administered as a standalone questionnaire (rather than relying on short form scores derived from responses to the full SRS) and of the newly developed CAT-based SRS in separate clinical and general population samples of children aged 3 to 5 years.

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